FRED WILLIAMS

From the mid 1960s, Fred Williams carried his interest in the function of the horizon line through a variety of experiments, from the skyless all-overness of My Garden, 1965-67, his version of Tom Roberts' Bailed Up, through 'the high skyline of Upwey' ¹, flat, straight and strongly-marked, to more baroque explorations: the steeply angled Hillside Series or the curved brackets which roll above the Mittagong Saplings, 1968.

In the Lysterfield landscapes of this period the artist oscillates between clear definition, with the horizontal strongly drawn and with a distinct difference in colour and tone between earth and sky, and a much more open, floating topography, where perspective and the limits of sight are defined only by the multiplication and diminution of his tree marks.

The present work is in many respects a characteristic Lysterfield 'view', with the pictorial-arboreal density strongest across the central third of the picture plane, between the blank sky and a foreground in which patchy scrubbed brushwork empties into the orange smear of a gully. What makes the painting particularly distinctive is a passage of brown and yellow at the top of the red-brown-white bush. Neither clear line nor emptiness, it conveys a sense of distance and atmosphere, presenting an almost naturalistic impression of distant hills within the framework of Williams' essential abstraction.

1. Fred Williams, letter to James Gleeson, quoted in Mollison, J. A Singular Vision: The Art of Fred Williams,  Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1989, p. 110